Human Rights
Atrocities

The
Consequences of United Nations Gun Confiscation in East Africa

By David B. Kopel,
Paul Gallant, Joanne D. Eisen

Independence Institute Issue Backgrounder no. 2006-F

June 2006. PDF
version of this text. More by Kopel on gun control in
Kenya and
Uganda.

On June 26, the
United Nations convened a major conference on gun control. Before demanding
further control, the delegates ought to insist that the United Nations halt the
use of torture, arson, and murder in the carrying-out of existing U.N. gun
control programs.

With United
Nations support, the governments of Kenya and Uganda are attempting to
confiscate all arms from the pastoral tribes of the Kenya-Uganda borderlands.
The “forcible disarmament” campaign has displaced tens and tens of thousands of
people, turning them into starving refugees.

The United Nations
and some NGOs relentlessly promote the theme that gun ownership is contrary to
human rights. [1] Yet the UN and the NGOs are too often silent about the extreme
human rights violations which are currently being perpetrated as a result of the
UN gun control campaign.

United Nations gun
control is the cause of a massive humanitarian crisis in East Africa. Any new
United Nations Programme of Action on small arms should include concrete
measures to ensure that U.N. gun control does not lead directly to rape,
pillage, murder, and de facto ethnic cleansing.

Kenya

Prasad Kariyawasam,
the Sri Lankan chair of the U.N. conference, says that the conference “does not
in any way address legal possession.” The statement is meant to be re-assuring
to American gun owners, but, in practice, the statement simply means that gun
confiscation will be implemented once the U.N. has succeeded in getting national
governments to eliminate the legal ownership of firearms. For example, UNESCO
and UNICEF funded the supporters of the October 2005 referendum in Brazil which
would have outlawed citizen firearms possession.

In Kenya, the
existence of a gun licensing program creates the legal fiction that law-abiding
Kenyan citizens can possess a firearm. But in reality, “Very few Kenyan
citizens, especially those living in remote areas, meet the criteria for a gun
license and can afford to pay the associated fees.” [2] In the Daily Nation,
Peter Mwaura explained “In practice, however, only the rich and the socially or
politically correct or well connected manage to obtain firearms certificates and
keep them...Thus the gun law can be pretty arbitrary and subjective in its
application.”

Ordinary Kenyans
are not even allowed to possess bows and arrows, and the bow and arrow laws are
also applied discriminatorily. [3]

Among the
pastoralists of the Kenya/Uganda borderlands, many households have firearms, and
the crime rate is low, although there is a substantial problem of violence
between tribes and clans, especially in cattle-raiding. Estimates of the
pastoralists’ gun stock range from 50,000 to 200,000 in Kenya, and 50,000 to
150,000 in Uganda. [4]

Yet even the worst
inter-tribal cattle-raiding violence is exceeded by the violence of the gun
confiscation programs. According to the Kenyan newspaper The Standard, “Internal
Security minister Mirugi Kariuki said the Government would stop at nothing to
recover the arms.” [5] West Pokot area District Commissioner Stephen Ikua warned
“We shall use force to get them.” [6]

In March 2006, a
shoot-to-kill directive for the entire country of Kenya was issued to police by
Internal Security minister John Michuki, giving the police free rein against the
populace. “The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights cautioned Kenyans to
brace themselves for a killing field if police officers were to effect the
order.” [7]

Extreme brutality
in the enforcement of gun prohibition is nothing new in Kenya. A gun
confiscation program which the military conducted in 1950 caused the deaths of
50 people, while the government confiscated 10,000 head of cattle. [8]

In 1961,
then-Lieutenant Colonel Idi Amin of the King’s African Rifles in the
then-British colony of Uganda crossed the border into Kenya and tortured and
terrorized members of the Turkana tribe who refused to give up their weapons. At
least 127 men were castrated and left to die. [9]

The failed 1984
“Operation NYUNDO” [Operation Hammer] was a brutal example of the difficulty of
disarming civilians who would rather risk death than surrender their ability to
protect their families. [10] “Operation NYUNDO” was a collaborative effort of
the Kenyan and Ugandan armies—as are the current gun confiscation programs in
those countries.

Krop Muroto, a
political activist, recalled: “No one knows to date how many people were killed
in that operation that lasted three months. The community was further devastated
by mass killing of their cattle. 20,000 head of cattle were confiscated, rounded
up in sheds and starved to death. Among other atrocities…the army used
helicopter gunships, killed people and destroyed a lot of property.” [11]

A May 11, 2006,
article by Reuters reported:

“Lopokoy Kolimuk,
an elder in the dusty and dry village of Kanyarkwat in the West Pokot district,
said the soldiers who carried out that mission were “wild, beyond humanity.” He
said many shot Pokots on sight, or forced men to lie on the ground in a line as
they ran across their backs. Other men had their testicles tied together and
were then made to run away from each other, he said. Women were raped in front
of their husbands, sometimes with empty beer bottles.” [12]

The atrocities in
1950, 1961, and 1984 were not committed as part of a United Nations program.
Surely the contemporary gun confiscation program, being conducted at the wishes
of the United Nations, would show respect for human rights?

To the contrary,
in April 2006, Security Minister John Michuki told Parliament, “The Government
has decided to disarm the Pokot by force. If they want an experience of 1984
when the Government used force to disarm them, then this is precisely what is
going to happen.” [13]

Stephen Ikua, a
government representative, said that threats were necessary in order to get
civilians to peacefully surrender their firearms. He said: “As a government, you
should talk from a position of strength. You cannot come in saying you are going
to respect human rights.” [14]

On May 4, 2006,
the BBC described the latest military operation in Kenya, code-named “Okota”
[Collect], utilizing tanks, trucks, helicopters, and a local school building as
barracks for the army. In the village of about 2,000 people, 8 weapons were
recovered by the intimidation. [15] Fearing a repeat of the 1984 human rights
violations that accompanied disarmament, 15,000 panicked people fled to Uganda
with their cattle and guns, leaving behind the aged, infirm, and the children.
[16]

The Standard
reported on May 18:

“Starvation and
anguish are now stalking West Pokot residents, since the Government launched a
forcible disarmament exercise a month ago….The residents now say they have
resigned themselves to fate and have become refugees in their own country ... .
A recent visit by The Standard revealed the sense of hopelessness and
vulnerability that the disarmament has brought, forcing majority residents to
relocate to Uganda. Schools have also become ghost institutions, with very few
pupils….Although the Government says the operation has not disrupted the
villagers’ normal life, a spot-check reveals otherwise.” [17]

In West Pokot
alone, 120,000 people need food aid, but only half are getting rations.
Schooling is disrupted, and farmsteads are being neglected. [18]

Five weeks after
the forced disarmament program began, seventy illegally possessed firearms had
been recovered. [19] Apparently, a few dozen firearms are reason enough for the
Kenyan government to go to war against its own citizenry.

Uganda

In 1970, Uganda’s
Firearms Act imposed national firearm registration and gun-owner licensing under
exceedingly stringent requirements. In practice, the law was used to make it
illegal for anyone to have a firearm, except persons deemed politically correct
by the dictatorship of Milton Obote.

A year later, Army
Chief of Staff Idi Amin wrested control of the country in a military coup. The
ensuing genocide of the Amin regime was perpetrated against a populace whose
primitive armaments did not approach the effectiveness of the killer government.
By the time the genocide ended in 1979, the estimated toll was 300,000
slaughtered Ugandans, the Karamojong tribespeople suffering a disproportionately
higher percentage at about 30,000 tribespersons. [20]

In response to
Amin’s murderous rule, the Karamojong began fabricating their own guns,
fashioning gun barrels from the steel tubing of metal furniture. [21] These
homemade guns were then used tactically to acquire better and more powerful ones
by attacking isolated police outposts where acquisition would not be terribly
costly in terms of tribal lives. When the Amin government was toppled and his
army fled, military firearms were traded, sold, or lost along the way to local
tribesmen, who also found easy access to now-deserted weapons depots.

Obote was restored
to power in 1979, after Amin attacked Tanzania, and was toppled by the Tanzanian
army. Obote again began to attempt to disarm the Karamojong. His efforts were
forcefully repelled. The Karamojong had learned that cows and guns are equally
indispensable: a person needs a gun immediately at hand to protect one’s herd.
The most-armed tribes fared the best.

Defeating Obote
and seizing power in 1986, President Yoweri Museveni reconstituted his rebel
forces as the new national army. Like his predecessors, Museveni attempted to
subdue the Karamojong. In Africa Studies Quarterly, Michael Quam explains that
“the soldiers misbehaved, bullying people and looting stores, and generally
convincing the Karimojong that their only protection from men with guns lay in
keeping guns themselves.” [22] The Ugandan government’s coercive disarmament
efforts met with so much resistance that Museveni let the matter drop in 1989.

But Museveni
started a new gun confiscation program at the behest of the United Nations. When
a voluntary gun surrender program expired in Uganda on February 15, 2002, and
only a disappointing 7,676 guns were collected, President Museveni turned up the
heat. The U.N. Integrated Regional Information Network announced that “the
forcible disarmament operation will involve the use of ‘police methods’... .”
[23] What the U.N. delicately called “police methods” might more precisely be
termed “Gestapo methods.”

The UPDF (the
Ugandan army, or Uganda People’s Defence Forces) rampaged, beating and torturing
Ugandans, and raping and looting at will, all the while using firearm
confiscation to justify the violence.

On March 21, 2002,
Father Declan O’Toole, a member of the Mill Hill Missionaries in Uganda, and his
companions were executed by UPDF soldiers because O’Toole asked the army to be
“less aggressive” in the disarmament campaign. [24] The murderers were
apprehended and their death sentence was carried out within days, before they
could appeal it—and also before they could reveal who had given them the order.
Just one week after O’Toole’s murder, New Vision reported the death of an
expectant mother who “died of injuries sustained when a soldier kicked her in
the stomach during forceful disarmament.” The article also noted the “Complaints
of torturing civilians by the UPDF.” [25]

Museveni’s answer
was to blame the victim Karamojong, whose torture by the army was the basis for
O’Toole’s complaint. Museveni “said the best way to stop such incidents in [the]
future is for the Karimojong to hand in their guns to eliminate any
justification for the UPDF operations in the villages.” [26]

By May 2002,
reports of fierce resistance from the remaining armed Karamojong began to
trickle out, despite government attempts to suppress knowledge of that
resistance and of the army’s brutality. For example, in Kotido, on May 16, the
Ugandan army engaged armed civilians and recovered about 30 rifles. Thirteen
civilians and two soldiers died, an average of one death for each two guns
confiscated. [27]

“After many homes
were bombed and crops were destroyed, tribesmen fled across the border to Kenya.
About 80,000 people were internally displaced.” [29] The Catholic Church charged
that thousands of residents of Karamoja were turned into refugees after their
homes were torched by UPDF troops in the disarmament campaign. By mid-July, the
total number of confiscated guns had reached 10,000—only about 25 percent of the
expected total.

Disarmed civilians
were preyed upon by those who still had weapons. Kenyans who had credulously
surrendered their guns were not rewarded with tranquility, but instead found
themselves especially vulnerable. As New Vision had earlier reported, “Most of
the people whose cows were taken” in a raid in the recently disarmed Bokora
district, “had handed in their guns to the government in the on-going
disarmament exercise.” [30]

In May 2006, at
least nine more civilians and three soldiers were killed in “forceful
disarmament” operations which seized a few dozen guns. Non-government
organizations which support voluntary Ugandan disarmament, have, speaking
anonymously, called the army’s forcible program “very cruel”, because of its
“endangering the lives of people.” [28]

Ben Knighton,
presenting a paper at an Oxford University conference, reported a damning list
of human rights abuses which constitute the disarmament program. He commented:
“Without guns any Karamojong is at the mercy of brutal soldiers….The state is
just another raider.” [31]

Knighton charged
that the violence was “due to an escalation in raiding directly stimulated by a
disarmament programme,” and that even that degree of violence among the
pastoralists may be overstated by gun prohibition activists and the Ugandan
government. [32] He noted that, in Karamoja, although there is a lack of medical
reporting, making precise figures unavailable: “With 130 gunshot-wounds being
treated a year in both the main hospitals (0.35 [wounds] per thousand), it is
small beer compared with 22,000 murders in South Africa in 2000 (0.51 [deaths]
per thousand). This analysis is directly counter to alarmist international aid
views, ‘the source of modern violence in Karamoja is automatic weaponry’.” [33]

In sum, Knighton
warns that if the Ugandan forced disarmament program “succeeds it will
accomplish the ethnocide of the nomadic pastoralist culture…if not their
genocide.” [34]

The First Step to
Reform

On June 28, 2006,
the Washington Post published an Associated Press report that the U.N.
Development Program (UNDP) had sent a letter to the Ugandan government on June
26, announcing the halt of U.N. financial assistance for the disarmament program
in Karamoja. The letter noted the “killings, beatings, arbitrary detention,
intimidation and harassment” perpetrated by Ugandan “security” forces.

The U.N.’s action
is laudable, and should be applauded by all human rights supporters. This is the
first time that the United Nations has ever criticized human rights abuses in a
disarmament program. It would have been better, of course, if the entire
international community had taken much stronger action starting in 2002, when it
became clear what the Ugandan army was doing in Karamoja. Instead, tens of
thousands of Ugandans were turned into refugees, their villages burned, and
their livelihood destroyed by the disarmament program.

Thus far, the
United Nations has remained silent about the similar human rights abuses being
perpetrated by Kenya’s disarmament program

Predictably, the
Ugandan government’s speech to the U.N. gun control conference did not even
mention the UNDP letter, and offered no indication that Uganda would make any
changes in its program of ethnocide by disarmament.

While this Issue
Backgrounder has focused on Kenya and Uganda, they are not the only nations
where disarmament has directly led to the violations of international human
rights. Guns in the wrong hands are a global problem, and so are human rights
violations caused by forced disarmament in nations such as Zimbabwe,
Bougainville, Cambodia, and Albania—and perhaps many others, where suppression
of the free press has prevented the world from learning the full scope of other
human rights abuses.

Conclusion

Quite clearly, the
leading source of modern violence and human rights violations in the
Kenya-Uganda border is the gun confiscation program.

Speaking to the
United Nations small arms conference on June 27, 2006, Cyrus T. Gituai,
Permanent Secretary, Provincial Administration/Internal Security, Office of the
President of Kenya, claimed that arms “transfers fanned violence, eroded human
development and seriously undermined peace efforts.” [35]

In truth, it is
the arms “transfers” (that is, confiscations) perpetrated by the Kenyan and
Ugandan governments, and the arms which other nations have transferred to the
abusive Kenyan and Ugandan militaries which are fanning violence, eroding
development, and destroying the peace.

Both Kenyan and
Ugandan governments state that their gun confiscation programs are carrying out
the wishes of the United Nations, pursuant to the Nairobi Protocol, an East
Africa treaty banning unlicensed gun possession (in practice, banning all gun
possession by anyone except the ruling elites). The Nairobi Protocol is a result
of the U.N.’s “Programme of Action” from the previous major U.N. conference on
gun control, in 2001.

IANSA
(International Action Network on Small Arms) is the world’s leading
international gun prohibition group; its staff members are serving as delegates
for some nations at the 2006 gun control conference, and one of its members,
professor Barbara Frey, is the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on guns and human
rights. The organization has been inappropriately reticent about the Kenya and
Uganda atrocities, praising the governmental actions with the euphemism of
“forced disarmament.” [36]

Many human rights
activists correctly point out that guns in the wrong hands can be used to
violate human rights, such as the guns possessed by the genocidal Janjaweed
Arab tribal gangsters in Darfur, which are armed and supported by the government
of Sudan, or the terrorist Lord’s Resistance Army in Sudan and Uganda.
Similarly, the guns in the hands of the Kenyan and Ugandan governments are a
major cause of human rights abuses today in the Kenya-Uganda borderlands.

The proper program
of action is clear for human rights activists whose top priority is human rights
(as opposed to self-proclaimed “human rights” supporters whose real priority is
gun confiscation regardless of human rights): genuine human rights activists
should work to ensure that all disarmament campaigns, especially those
undertaken pursuant to U.N. efforts, meet the same high standards of adherence
of human rights as would be expected of any other government campaign.

As a result,
disarmament campaigns would generally be voluntary—supported by public education
and financial rewards—and would not be coercive.

Arile Lomerinyang,
a former tribal warrior in Kenya, traveled to New York City to present a gun
control petition. Yet even he rejects what the Kenyan government is doing.
According to The East African, “he says the Kenya government is going about the
whole [disarmament] exercise the wrong way. ‘It won’t yield any fruit. Local
residents, especially the the Pokots, were never consulted. The government
assumed the big-boss mentality by not inviting our leaders for any
discussions’...”

“He went further
to accuse the government of using excessive force and acting at the behest of
foreigners. He claims some residents have fled to Uganda to escape the forced
disarmament. Those left behind have hidden their firearms. ‘Very few weapons, if
any, will be recovered. It is an exercise in futility.’” [37]

Supporters of
human rights can have legitimate disagreements about the circumstances when
disarmament will genuinely advance human rights. But no sincere advocate of
human rights can dispute that the Kenya/Uganda program of “forced disarmament”
is a massive human rights atrocity, an evil program that must be condemned by
the international community just as forcefully as any other government program
which produces so much cruelty—wanton murder, rape, torture, arson, and turning
so many innocent men, women, and children into starving refugees.

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Endnotes

1. E.g., Barbara
Frey, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Prevention of Human Rights
Violations Committed with Small Arms and Light Weapons, Small arms and light
weapons: the tools used to violate human rights, in Disarmament Forum (no. 3,
2004): 37-46.

26. Nathan Etengu,
Museveni Defends Executions, New Vision (Kampala), Apr. 4, 2002,
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200204040283.html. See also Badru
Mulumba, UPDF Soldiers Executed for Killing Priest, The Nation (Nairobi) Mar.
27, 2002,
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200203260702.html (“Mill Hill
missionaries said Fr. Declan had recently lodged a protest with the military
commander…’he used the occasion to seek suitable outlets for his growing concern
that the ongoing army brutality against local civilians, including women and
children, should not go unnoticed,’ the missionaries said ... . The priest had
been opposed to the ongoing forceful disarmament.”).

30. Nathan Etengu,
Army Ordered to Recover Cattle, New Vision (Kampala), Jan. 8, 2002,
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200201080070.html. See also Daniel
Wallis, Karamojong Warriors Fear Disarmament in Uganda, Red Orbit News
(Reuters), Sept. 21, 2005. After the men of Kosui disarmed voluntarily, they
were robbed of their cattle by Jie tribesmen who had not disarmed. They became
subsequently dependent on UN aid for their survival.

31. Ben Knighton,
Historical Ethnography and the Collapse of Karamojong Culture: Premature Reports
of Trends, African Studies Seminar June 13, 2002,
http://www.eldis.org/fulltext/knighton_karamoja.pdf (A witness reported to
Knighton, “Sometimes the soldiers are not even interested in the livestock; they
just shoot.”).

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